NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "Reveals how we can all surpass our perceived physical limits." --Adam Grant

Limits are an illusion: a revolutionary book that reveals the secrets of accessing your hidden extra potential

Foreword by Malcolm Gladwell

The capacity to endure is the key trait that underlies great performance in virtually every field--from a 100-meter sprint to a 100-mile ultramarathon, from summiting Everest to acing final exams or completing any difficult project. But what if we all can go farther, push harder, and achieve more than we think we're capable of?

Blending cutting-edge science and gripping storytelling in the spirit of Malcolm Gladwell--who contributes the book's foreword--award-winning journalist Alex Hutchinson reveals that a wave of paradigm-altering research over the past decade suggests the seemingly physical barriers you encounter as set as much by your brain as by your body. This means the mind is the new frontier of endurance--and that the horizons of performance are much more elastic than we once thought.

But, of course, it's not "all in your head." For each of the physical limits that Hutchinson explores--pain, muscle, oxygen, heat, thirst, fuel--he carefully disentangles the delicate interplay of mind and body by telling the riveting stories of men and women who've pushed their own limits in extraordinary ways.

The longtime "Sweat Science" columnist for Outside and Runner's World, Hutchinson, a former national-team long-distance runner and Cambridge-trained physicist, was one of only two reporters granted access to Nike's top-secret training project to break the two-hour marathon barrier, an extreme quest he traces throughout the book. But the lessons he draws from shadowing elite athletes and from traveling to high-tech labs around the world are surprisingly universal. Endurance, Hutchinson writes, is "the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop"--and we're always capable of pushing a little farther.

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Reviews

`This book is AMAZING!' - MALCOLM GLADWELL `If you want to gain insight into the mind of great athletes, adventurers, and peak performers then prepare to be enthralled by Alex Hutchinson's Endure.' -BEAR GRYLLS `Anyone who has ever felt exhausted, whether from heat or cold or altitude or pain or simply a loss of will, is going to find their own experience in this book." - DAVID EPSTEIN, author of The Sports Gene An essential read for every endurance athlete." - AMBY BURFOOT, 1968 Boston Marathon winner and editor of Runner's World Complete Book of Running `This is an excellent resource for anyone seeking to better to understand how our minds influence our ultimate performances.' - TIM NOAKES, emeritus professor of exercise science at the University of Cape Town

Author description

Alex Hutchinson is a contributing editor at Popular Mechanics magazine, senior editor at Canadian Running magazine, and columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail. He holds a master's in journalism from Columbia and a Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge, and he did his post-doctoral research with the U.S. National Security Agency.